Tag Archives | File Sharing

On March 7, Camelot Distribution Group, an obscure film company in Los Angeles, unveiled its latest and potentially most profitable release: a federal lawsuit against BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded the company’s 2010 B-movie revenge flick Nude Nuns With Big Guns between January and March of this year. The single lawsuit targets 5,865 downloaders, making it theoretically worth as much as $879,750,000 — more money than the U.S. box-office gross for Avatar.

At the moment, the targets of the litigation are unknown, even to Camelot. The mass lawsuit lists the internet IP addresses of the downloaders (.pdf), and asks a federal judge to order ISPs around the country to dig into their records for each customer’s name.

It’s the first step in a process that could lead to each defendant getting a personalized letter in the mail from Camelot’s attorneys suggesting they settle the case, lest they wind up named in a public lawsuit as having downloaded Nude Nuns With Big Guns.

Dead Drops is a project in which USB flash drives are installed on the streets of New York City for anonymous file-sharing by strangers. Thus far, five USBs are hidden around the city. Find them to add or take whatever files you wish.

‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop contains a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is still in progress, to be continued here and in more cities.

Police in several European countries are coordinating a fight against a certain “radical conception of freedom,” embodied by Wikileaks and Pirate Bay. Rogue euronerds beware, French paper-of-record Le Monde writes:

The Swedish police raided the premises of the host PRQ in Solna, Sweden. This “host activist” advocates a radical conception of freedom of expression, including the servers hosting the download site The Pirate Bay or sites advocating pedophilia. It is also the host of Wikileaks, the site specializes in the publication of confidential documents made public this summer tens of thousands of reports of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

According to preliminary information from Swedish media, the search was linked to a download illegal files, as part of an investigation by Belgian police launched two years ago.

Other raids have taken place in other Swedish cities and in other countries including the Netherlands and Hungary. No arrest has been performed in PEQ, contrary to a previous search in 2006, as part of an investigation into The Pirate Bay, when several machines were confiscated by police.

A British lawyer’s firm sent thousands of letters demanding £500 ($800) damage payments over filesharing, based on IP addresses obtained from ISPs. But now England’s Solicitors Regulation Authority is referring that lawyer to a disciplinary tribunal after hearing strong complaints from a consumer watchdog group. Which? Magazine had received testimonials from more than 20 different people who insisted they hadn’t actually shared any files, and were being wrongly accused. (“It appears few if any of the recipients have subsequently been successfully prosecuted over the claims…”)

Today the consumer group which publishes the magazine applauded the news of the disciplinary tribunal, “because we’ve received so many complaints from consumers who believe they been treated appallingly by this law firm.” The filesharing could’ve occurred over unsecure wireless connections, the group argues, and they added that the lawyer’s behavior was “both aggressive and bullying.”

Klint Finley: I guess I’ll start with, just to get it out of the way, the announcement has been put out that Pan Sonic has split up, so was this an amicable split?

Mika Vainio: Well, let’s say that we don’t have any plans to start again, but maybe we do one day. It’s still open, but I don’t think, at least for a couple years, we will not do it.

So are you willing to talk anymore about the reasons behind the split or do you want to leave it at that?

Yeah, why not. There has been no argument or bad spirit or anything like that. It’s just that after, we’ve been doing this for over 15 years, it’s time to stop and concentrate on our own solo things. […]

The record business has been going through a lot of transitions lately through music piracy through the Internet and there’s also the economic crash that makes it harder for people who might want to pay for music to actually pay for music.